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I enjoyed my summer break (hello, Sweden & France and quite a few friends’ weddings!) and then started a new job. Life has been busy! I’m not claiming I’ll blog as regularly as I used to, but wanted to at least share a few things from the units we’ve done so far. Up first: The Kissing Hand.

What a nice story to kick off the year. Quite a few of our students have some difficulty separating from their parents, especially at the beginning of the year, so it’s a good pick. A few ideas:

-For following directions, I made a visual with a photo of a mother raccoon and a baby raccoon. I laminated/velcroed hearts and applied velcro to the raccoons’ hands, heads, tails, etc. The students were asked to give Chester a kiss on his hand, put a kiss on his mom’s tail, etc. They also got to put the hearts wherever they wanted, and tell us what they chose.

–Question of the week: at the end of our unit, I copied three scenes from the story (Mom kissing Chester, Chester kissing Mom, Chester going to school) and—with laminated/magnet photos of each child—had them cast their vote for their favorite scene. Especially with a citizenship unit coming up, we want to get used to voting! Good for introducing concepts like most/least.

–Parent communication: I sent home all the visuals from the story (which we used during quite a few readings of the book to listen/match/label) and visuals for questions the students answered from the story. Boardmakershare has more visuals for questions made by other users.

-iPad: I used “PeekaBoo Forest”, which has a lot of the animals from The Kissing Hand. Good for labeling forest animals and the changing seasons.

I’ve had some requests via email to share some of my Google Docs. I believe all of them are open to anyone who follows a link from here or sees one elsewhere, so this shouldn’t be necessary. Please let me know if you’re having issues accessing anything!

I didn’t really plan to take a hiatus this summer, but that’s how it’s worked out! Did summer school this year, but that wrapped up last week and now I’m truly on summer break (off to Europe next week!). I actually just accepted a new job (still in early childhood), so am really excited to start the new school year and I’m sure will have lots to post.

Thought I’d post the books we used for summer school in our speech/OT/social work group to coordinate with our themes (+ a few ideas).

Ocean:The Pout Pout Fish (we followed directions—finding a fish or frog and crawling through a tunnel to hand it off to an adult, labeling it; sang this song (“Let’s Go Swimming”); sorted ocean vs. farm animals with Boardmaker visuals and beanie babies; identified animals with the Peek-a-Boo Ocean app).

Zoo: 1,2,3, to the Zoo & Goodnight Gorilla(we matched zoo animal legos, identified plenty of zoo animals on the iPad, made a zoo of our own with beanie babies, made zoo animals with playdoh)

Vacation: Flip Flop (we packed a suitcase to go on vacation with lots of Miss Elena’s clothes, spread out beach towels/pretended to go to the beach, pretended to surf and spot ocean animals while dancing to to “Surfin’ USA”, made sandwiches for a beach picnic with this great kit).

This week’s book was Icky Sticky Frog. We have enough copies for each student to hold their own (the tongue/fly attachment on the book is quite the hit), which they always like! Gives us a nice chance to review some of our academic vocabulary (cover, title, author, illustrator, back cover, etc). It’s a nice story for sequencing/recalling: what did the frog eat first? Next? After reading the story we got out a bouncy frog and set up bug visuals around it. The students each got to pick a frog bean bag, bounce it, and label/describe the insect to which their frog landed the closest (e.g. caterpillar: long, green, fuzzy, will be a butterfly). Then we split into two fine motor groups—-one went to make caterpillars with paint, another used tongs to go on a “bug hunt” in two “bean boxes”. Students described the bugs they found. Question of the day: If you could be a bug, what bug would you be (answers were actually pretty great, especially from the students who could answer “why”)? Song:5 Green & Speckled Frogs

This week’s book: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. There are a lot of materials and ideas out there, but wanted to share a few that our program made this week/some tools we loved having for our hour-long speech/motor/social work group. Click above for the SMARTBoard activity my co-worker Kristin and I made. We put a little more effort into this one—hope you enjoy! Focuses on vocabulary from the book and following directions (can make as simple/challenging as you want). Click above also for a sequencing visual (helpful for preK kids starting to retell stories/working on slow, smooth speech/artic targets during less structured tasks). Here are the visuals from the story (part I, part II).

Some photos from our large group activities are below. We read the story and then split into three groups. One group went with our social worker and used the Toca Tea Party App. Another worked with our occupational therapist, rolling out play doh and using cookie cutters. My group used the Cookie Maker app, which is free! I’d highly recommend it. Awesome for following directions and sequencing. The visuals are great—can really see the dough getting mixed and flattening as you roll it, etc. There’s a donut version that looks even better/more complicated (to use with If You Give a Dog a Donut?). Once the kids had all been through each station, we had snack. Was it a healthy snack? Um, no. They each got an oreo cookie and a chocolate chip one…and then—after a taste test—got to pick one more of whichever was their favorite (hey, calories for the sake of answering wh- questions ;-D). After snack we played “Who Stole the Cookie From the Cookie Jar” (always a favorite, no matter what version…chicken nugget from the Happy Meal, syrup from the pancake stack…).

I love all the Laura Numeroff/Felicia Bond books, but the original does the cause-effect relationship the best! Great story for preK.

Here are a couple of bunny-themed books I made. One was made for expanding utterances (e.g. The bunny ate 3 strawberries). Can be also be used for counting, matching, labeling items, irregular past tense verbs. The other is for targeting spatial concepts. I loved using the bunny books mentioned last week, but for my students it was also helpful to have a variety of spatial concepts (e.g. in front, behind, top, bottom). Hope you find them useful!

This week’s book was “There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” In our large group, we read the story (having the kids predict what animal she would eat next and practice sequencing—-which animal did she eat first? next? last?) and then retold it using a felt board/props. During the story we had each kid hold a prop (animal) and, when they heard theirs, come up and feed it to the Old Lady puppet we had (similar to this). With the felt board, we had the kids try to remember all the animals in order with no visuals. They were actually pretty darn awesome at this (especially for it being the first day after break!). We also took away an animal or two and checked to see if they could tell us which one was missing. Question of the day: Which animal from the story was your favorite (no visuals, though of course would’ve provided if needed)? Snack: apple slices + marshmallows (count out 5!) to make a mouth & teeth. We also have some great Scholastic DVDs and had the chance to watch the story at the end of our group. Highly recommend these!

P.S. Stumbled across Consonantly Speaking’s resource page yesterday and am excited to look through the many, many SLP blogs listed! If you’re loving any blogs (or have started your own), would love to hear about them!